Otto Brenner
Otto Brenner was a German trades unionist and politician. Between 1956 and 1972 he was the leader of the powerful IG Metall .
In a tribute published in 1967 to celebrate Brenner's sixtieth birthday the politician-commentator Peter von Oertzen wrote that "Otto Brenner... embodies more than any other German trades union leader that generation – a link between the older generation of the Weimar years and the younger generation that grew to maturity after 1945 – which rescued the best traditions of the German labour movement to the present day, bridging the intervening abyss of the Fascist rule".
The Otto-Brenner Foundation for the promotion of scientific research and knowledge is named after him, as is the annually awarded.
Life
Provenance and early years
Otto Brenner was born and grew up in Hanover, the third of his parents' four children. His mother was a "washerwoman". With the outbreak of war his father was conscripted for military service and life became harder: Otto was just seven. Hanover was home to several large engineering/manufacturing businesses: Brenner eventually trained successfully for work as an industrial electrician. However, the family was not wealthy, and the immediate postwar period was one of acute economic hardship. When he first left school the family could not afford for him to embark on any sort of period of training. Instead he went to work first as a grocery store assistant and then for a small business that manufactured boilers. Here he was engaged in physically heavy work as a rivet-warmer and rivet-presser. He worked next to an extremely hot industrial furnace which produced high levels of carbon monoxide. By the time he reached the age of fifteen he had contracted a severe lung disease which would leave him vulnerable to lung disorders for the rest of his life.Politics and trades unionism
He joined the Young Socialists in 1920 and the Metal Workers' Union in 1922. Driven by a conviction that alcohol and tobacco were contributing to the catastrophic material condition and what he perceived as the political lethargy of working people, he campaigned energetically against their misuse, and in 1926 founded a local branch of the German Workers' Abstinence League, taking on the chairmanship himself. He would remain a life-long non-smoker and vegetarian. He consumed alcohol only very sparingly. Meanwhile, it was at the social events organised by the Young Socialists that he met Martha Werner who would subsequently become his wife.It was in 1925, after a period of illness, that he took unskilled work in the electrical components section of the local Hanomag railway locomotive and road vehicle plant. Taking advantage of adult education opportunities and evening training sessions, he was soon able to qualify as a skilled assembly worker. As a young man he became a sports and fitness enthusiast. He also demonstrated a commitment to political education, leading the Marxist study circle of the Hanover Young Socialists and developing his own philosophy of socialism. At around the same time that he launched the local DAAB branch, by now aged 21, he also joined the Social Democratic Party.
Between 1 November and 3 December 1928 he participated in the so-called Ruhr Iron Strike which involved, according to at least one source, the largest industrial lock-out in the industrial north-west of Germany during the entire Weimar period. In the end the strikers succeeded in pushing through significant wage increases. Brenner drew valuable lessons about both the responsibilities and the sheer power of trades unions from the experience. However, the Wall Street Crash ten months later ushered in a period of sustained economic downturn across Europe. Unemployment in Germany rose to six million: those affected suffered real hardship. In 1931 Otto Brenner became one of them. Brenner had long held a strong belief in the power of self-education, however, and over the several years of unemployment that ensued he was able to devote more time to reading political books.
As later as 1932 the SPD held the largest number of seats in the Reichstag, and even at the July 1932 election they still comfortably out-polled the Communists. Nevertheless, the rise of the extremists and of other right wing parties meant the SPD were no longer part of the government coalition after 1930. It was therefore from a position of relative political weakness that in 1931 the party supported the building of a new generation of war tanks. Citing a "credibility deficit", Brenner resigned angrily from the party. According to some reports he was expelled from it. Either way, he now joined the breakaway Socialist Workers' Party. By the start of 1932 the local SAPD for Braunschweig-Hanover had a membership of around 200, and they elected Brenner their branch chairman. The defining purpose of the SAPD was to promote a coming together between the SPD and the Communists in order to protect the country from a take-over by right-wing populists. Brenner decried what he saw as the "capitulation policy" of the SPD leadership and their trades union allies. Later he would make it clear that he believed that the SPD must accept a share of the responsibility for the collapse of Germany's first republic. He called for a "united proletarian front" of the KPD, SPD and SAPD. His urgent arguments, and those of fellow SAPD activists, failed to find significant resonance within the SPD and the KPD, however.
In the light of developments in the Federal Republic of Germany after the Nazi nightmare ended in 1945, it is nevertheless important to emphasize that through the 1930s Brenner never stopped supporting the economic positions of the SPD, especially with regard to economic democracy as propounded by two particularly influential economists, Peretz Naftali and Rudolf Hilferding. For them, and for Otto Brenner, economic democracy offered the route towards a socialist democratic structure by means of a gradual and peaceful transition. The 1929 market crash and the Great Depression's economic depression that followed, along with the subsequent paralysis of the Reichstag that was ended only by the National Socialist take-over in January 1933, all combined to strengthen Brenner's conviction that, in the context of the relationship between economics and the world of politics, the underlying principal for trades unions must always be that democracy is a prerequisite for trades union activities, and economic actions must be subject to democratic control.
National Socialism and war
was followed by a rapid transition to one-party dictatorship during the first part of 1933. The SAPD, like most other political parties, became illegal. Otto Brenner nevertheless believed in the need to use the party as an instrument of resistance to tyranny, and despite the ban continued to work on party recruitment and organisation. There are references to his having led and/or been part of the "SAPD Resistance Group" in Hanover with his brother and sister-in-law Kurt and Käte Brenner. He visited a number of cities in order to create and build contacts with local SAPD parties across the country.During the summer of 1933 he was also involved with the Committee for Proletarian Unity, a resistance group built up since 1930 by the Hanover communist Eduard Wald, apparently in anticipation of the National Socialist take-over. The extent and nature of Brenner's involvement in the group is hard to determine, however, and it probably lasted for no more than a few months.
An important personal development was Brenner's marriage to his long-time friend Martha Werner on 3 August 1933.
In the immediate aftermath of the Reichstag fire the authorities concentrated their harassment/persecution on political activists identified as communists. Many were arrested and others fled abroad. On 30 August 1930, however, after he returned from one of his trips, Otto Brenner was arrested and taken into investigatory custody. During the eighteen months of uncertainty that followed he was permitted to remain in touch with his wife by letter. The charge, when it came on 9 May 1935, was the usual one under these circumstances: "Preparing to commit high treason". The verdict was largely a foregone conclusion, but the sentence, delivered by the Hamm District Court on 25 June 1935, was relatively mild. He was sentenced to a two-year jail term. This had largely been spent in pre-trial detention, and a few months later he was able to return to his wife in Hanover-Buchholz. He remained under police surveillance till the end of the 1939–45 war, however.
Following release he was permitted to work as an electrician in and around Hanover, though during the next ten years the risk of re-arrest never went away. He was deemed "wehrunwürdig" and therefore, despite the return of war in September 1939, he avoided conscription. He was, however, sent to work in Frankfurt on civil engineering projects and as a courier for the Frankfurter Zeitung.
A couple of years after the war started, on 1 October 1941, Heike Brenner, the Brenners' only child, was born.
During the final part of the war Brenner was back in Hanover, able to experience the destructive British and American bombing which peaked in the Autumn/Fall of 1943; but the bombs continued to drop till April 1945. Having lived through the German disaster between 1933 and 1945, Otto Brenner drew one conclusion in particular to which he would remain true for the rest of his life: "Another 1933 must never be allowed to happen."